Philosophy

I, on numerous occasion throughout the years, have included in my posts the observation that the Industrial Capitalists have taken liberally from Big Tobacco’s play book of how to defeat scientific and populist concerns about their behavior and policies. When science and citizens began complaining about the unhealthy effects of tobacco and smoking, Big Tobacco shifted the debate from health to whether or not cigarettes “caused”cancer.

This debate, as you well know, went on for decades as proving something causes cancer is all but impossible. So instead of having to admit the obvious and highly documented negative health impacts of tobacco including the incredible number of toxins and poisons in the cigarettes, they were able to fend off such realities with a conceptual debate on causes of cancer or there even being a possible way to ascertain absolute cause of any multivariable health issue.

The science of the early ecological and environmental science movement is the late 60’s and 70’s had no trouble showing and documenting the unhealthy aspects of dumping tons of toxins and poisons into our land, water and air. And like big tobacco, the industrialized corporate community could tie up litigations in courts for years. Yet, like big tobacco they reveled at the opportunity to switch the debate from easily documentable health implications into a theoretical debate as to whether the poisonous assault on our environment is/was causing global warming.

During the great cancer debate smoking enthusiasts (nicotine addicts) were able to cite personal or anecdotal testimonials of people who had smoked two or three packs a day for decades and never got cancer. Likewise the capitalist industrialist (greed and wealth addict) is able to cite numerous examples of how their practices have in some way improved the environment and quality of life while finding many isolated and cherry picked studies which draw into the question the whole reality of the cause of global warming or its very existence.

While the term ecology was coined in the late 1860’s it took almost a full century before ecological science had popularized concerns that the very survival of much of the life of the planet was being threatened by human generated pollution and industry. In the mid 1960’s Buckminster Fuller began to popularize the idea that the earth was in essence a self-contained spaceship hurdling through the universe. He maintained that while the earth had evolved over billons of years to become a lush and flourishing home to an amazing array of organic life it was also a vulnerable and fragile enclosed biosphere that could be destroyed by the careless actions of humanity.

The more we learn about the planet and all of its organic life the more we see how intertwined and interlaced it all is. While it is true that the fight for survival gets played out in so many arenas of organic life, it is equally obvious that there is an even stronger dynamic of things working and functioning together. Life on planet earth does not just survive, but thrives and flourishes. In general, life uses the dead and dying life as fuel as a means of getting rid of waste and having the greater organism (earth) grow, thrive and flourish. The more we learn, viewing the earth’s biosphere as a living organism is more literal than figurative.

When one acknowledges that the earth is one huge spaceship one can easily see how foolish, dangerous and destructive pollution and war are to the long term survival of much of organic life, including humans. The Starship Enterprise, the famous spaceship from the TV series Star Trek was supposed to be half mile long and home to a couple of thousand people. Imagine how quickly it would have become a mass grave if it would have been home to endless wars amongst its crew members or would have been generating poisons and toxins inside the spaceship and becoming part of its circulated air and water supply.

While space ship earth is far larger it is still silly to think we and most of organic life can continue to survive and flourish when under constant assault through the propagation of poisons and toxins into our living environment. The earth took some 3 billion or so years to become stable and suitable enough to allow organic life to survive. All of organic life has a relatively narrow band of temperature, chemical composition, etc. in which they can survive. While it is true that the adaptable survive, it is also true that adaptation takes time and acceptable changes move at a snails pace in which hundreds of our generations aren’t even a recognizable blip on the screen.

The above discussion now has advanced to the point where we can talk about its title, Killing the Host. The earth is the host of all of life, and as a planet it is itself a living biosphere teeming with life. The earth as biosphere is alive and is filled with life in the very same manor that each human being is alive and their body and viscera is teeming with life.

Our activities are killing the host, that being earth, in much the same way that microbes, bacteria, germs, etc. canthreaten, make ill and even kill the body. While the fight for survival is usually dominated by a need to kill or eat the dead, dying or disabled to acquire fuel the killing the host method is quite rare and inefficient. In general organic life does not eat or kill something into extinction for a predator is dependent on the survival and flourishing of its prey for its continued survival and flourishing.

The vast majority of organisms that kill the host do so only during a relatively short adjustment period (especially considering the organic life time line which spans hundreds of millions or even billions of years). Once mutual adaptation occurs, if not becoming a mutually beneficial “teem/team” member, the once lethal organism either adapts to being a parasite or becomes an agent causing temporary dis-ease.

Shortly after developing microscopes strong enough to see bacteria we recognized the role they can play in deadly inflections, diseases and plagues. Soon the general populace began to view all germs (bacterium) as predatory and lethal, beginning a decades long, and in many cases still existing, war against the germ.

Recent dissemination to the public of the essential and beneficial role bacteria play in digestion as well as many other functions of our organs and central nervous system has still not removed the evil status of germs. Even when acknowledging their necessary role in both our surviving and flourishing we still feel it necessary to talk of good and bad bacterial cultures such as in the talk on probiotics.

When a microorganism is in its lethal stage, for its own survival, it must find a new host to inhabit before its old host expires. One of the more common ways in which lethal organisms jump from one host to another is when it becomes “air born” through sneezing or coughing.

When one frames the current status of mankind as a lethal germ whose activities are endangering and killing the host (various biomes and the earth’s biosphere in total) we can equate our desire to seek survival through space travel and “colonizing” other planets as our truly “exploring” ways to find another host to infect and kill. We are totally capable of adapting and becoming as life affirming and promoting as any other organic organism on planet earth, but our current course is one of killing the host.

Please look for and read my next post entitled “Does the Body Secrete Self-Consciousness?” which poses how we got where we are at, and what are some potential alternative courses of action. We can in deed become one of the most beneficial organisms in natures progression in having organic life continue to thrive and flourish in an ever increasing efficient and life affirming manner.

For those of you new to the site, or who haven’t visited in awhile I invite you to fully explore GuidoWorld and all it has to offer. If you click on to the Words tab at the far top right you will currently see four of my novels along with two of my nonfiction books.

I have recently updated the page so that the entire books are posted rather than just some selected chapters. Within the next year I plan on posting two or three more of my books, so by the time you finish reading the current menu of my works more should be available.

A couple tabs to the left of Words you will find the Music tab. There you will find the growing library of my albums. The music contained on the albums spans from the early 80’s all the way up to the present. Similar to the book menu, the posted music library will continue to grow and be of a higher quality throughout the year. Of the 19 albums currently listed 14 of them have been remixed and remastered and will show themselves as part of Bandcamp.

The remaining five plus an additional five more albums are in the process of being updated and remixed. My son, who is a far better recording technician than myself will be in charge of the new revised mixes. Since I have a huge backlog of songs and I still write and record between 8 and 12 songs a year, new albums will be appearing in the foreseeable future.

The podcast button is new and is rather sparse at this point. Within the next year or so I plan on beginning to record a number of podcasts that discuss my books and music, as well as all discuss and expand upon all of the social, political and psychological topics that you have covered in my posts over the last decade.

Those who have been faithful readers to this site know how much I am enthralled with life, and how much I relish the opportunity to share and to grow. Thanks for taking the time to read, listen to and ponder all that I have produced and posted over the years.
Enjoy!

The KISS principle (keep it simple stupid) is said to have been originated in the early sixties by the navy and referred to the importance and benefit of simple design. Albert Einstein was a big proponent of the idea and felt that any good theory must be simple and elegant, and that complicated formulas and solutions are both inefficient and unusable.

I have stated on numerous occasions that people generally make life far more complicated that it has to be. Experiences such as joy, happiness, peace and harmony are not that complicated, let alone idealistic. The majority of people conduct the vast majority of their social interactions in a peaceful and harmonious manner. In a world of indoor plumbing, potable water, electricity, etc. we are now in a position for most societies, if not the entire globe, to live increasingly comfortable and rewarding lives.

Yet, the greedy and power hungry minority spawn fear and hatred as a means of making the good life the possession of the few by complicating life and convincing the masses that life’s simple pleasures are idealistic and unattainable. Destroying the elegance and simplicity of cooperation by presenting the easiest conflict as unresolvable and flatly stating that all realistic options and acts of diplomacy have been exhausted when nary a one has been explored.

When breaking down a rewarding life into its simplest terms I come up with a few observations. First I yearn for intimacy. I don’t just mean having an intimate relationship with other people, but an intimate relationship with myself, nature and life in general. Intimacy is just the natural process of becoming closer and more familiar with something. One can be intimate with almost any object, idea or activity. I explored this in depth in my book Exploring Intimacy which can be read here:

The second major category is to better enjoy the integration of all aspects of our/my experience. This would mean that I enjoy the sensorial, emotional and mental aspects of my life. In other words I learn how to maximize my experience by enjoying and savoring my being a thinking and feeling sentient person which exists in a body and lives in a world. The third element is my feeling connected to the world and act in a way which improves and maintains not only my quality of life but that of all of organic life.

Applying these ideas to our shared social world we come up with the following. We can keep things simple if we focus on the following. First we should not only tolerate but encourage all to find and cultivate intimacy in their lives. Second we can protect the quality of people’s lives and experiences by not destroying the environment and endangering people’s health through dumping toxins and poisons into our air, land and water.

The third guiding principle is that the major goal and concern of all personal and social behavior is to be life affirming. Being life affirming not only has us move away from poisoning our land, water and air, but also dictates that we make peace and harmony the goal and focus of all our decisions. In a life affirming society any action which harms others or the environment would be attended to and not be allowed to become entrenched or a habit of government. No action which caused harm or impaired the quality of life would be considered an act of progress or even tolerated. Only actions which enhanced or maintained the quality of life of the majority would be considered progress.

Einstein pointed out that one needs to be as simple as one can be without becoming too simple. While intimacy and integrated experience are relatively straight forward, the concept of being life affirming will always be a work in progress. In many situations it will be easy to determine what is life affirming, yet in many areas assessing what is the most life affirming option both near and far term will be challenging.

The fact that social utopias do not exist should not be alarming nor discouraging. The fact that life is an endless process of improvement and development only adds to its preciousness, and is inherent in the concept of intimacy. Yet, do let the greedy and power hungry convince you that life’s lack of perfection means everything is too complicated and joy, peace and harmony are idealistic fictions. Joy, intimacy and harmony are real experiences and not ideals. Real experience is never perfect, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be simple or elegant.

One does not have to deny the reality of pain and suffering to appreciate the reality of joy, love, intimacy and harmony.

Let’s begin by breaking down an experience into its simplest parts. All events are not experiences. The difference between an event and an experience is that an event needs to be accompanied by at least a modicum of awareness for it to become an experience. Therefore:

Event + Awareness = Experience

There are many levels and means of being aware. As humans we are not only aware of our environment but also possess a self-awareness. While there is emerging data that supports the fact we are not the only sentient beings with a nascent sense of themselves, it is generally accepted that our level of self-awareness is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. Our complex and highly articulate use of language is the medium through which our heightened form of self-consciousness seems to most reside. Therefore, we could use this observation to modify our above formula of experience to:

Sensorial perception + Self-consciousness = Experience or

Sentience + Thought = Experience

Yet, even this expanded formula for experience leaves out an important element of human experience. While the definition of sentience involves both feeling and perceiving, the feeling aspect of sentience is usually more literal in that we sensorial feel things rather than emotionally feel things. Yet, for humans the emotional aspect of feeling is an important if not essential element of our experience. So, our expanded formula for human experience should be:

Sentience + Thought + Emotion/Feeling = Experience

You may wonder why I included feelings along with emotions, that is because I make a distinction between feelings and emotions. Feelings are often more a part of our sentient self falling below the level of awareness of the self-conscious ego. Feeling can be viewed as a general attitudinal background for our experiences. We may feel safe, calm, relaxed, agitated, irritated, or anxious without necessarily being consciously aware of this underlying state.

Emotions, on the other hand, are generally more conscious reactions to these underlying feelings or a reactive response to others or events in our environment. As an example someone who is feeling uncomfortable may be more susceptible to becoming angry or harsh with others. While feelings are what we viscerally feel, emotions are literally what we emote. Continue Reading »

Here are a few themes from early philosophy, science and religion which continue to influence our beliefs, attitudes and assumptions regarding truth, meaning and the nature of human existence.

Early philosophers such as Plato desired to anchor knowledge and meaning in the impermeable and eternal. While human experience was transitory and unstable ideas and concepts were true, fixed and universally valid. According to this view point ideas are real and valid while tangible objects are imperfect and relatively insignificant copies of reality.

The superiority of form and essence over the world of sensations and subjective perception was also found in the pure science of mathematics. Perfection, precision and universal law were revealed in the pure form of number and geometry. Certainty, truth, natural/universal law, and objective knowledge were attainable not through sensorial human experience but in revealing the underlying immutable form obtained through math.

All hard sciences from astronomy, to physics to medicine acquired objective knowledge and certainty in the realms of math and universal law which lay outside the subjective realms of sensation and perception. Truth, certainty and immutable fact were the sole property of pure form and essences garnered though math and objective experimentation, while human experience was deceptive at best if not entirely illusionary.

The belief that all human sensorial, emotional and perceptual experience was an illusion was fundamental to most spiritual practices such as Buddhism as well as a core tenet of the major salvation religions. All truth and certainty existed in the sacred and ideal space which lay underneath or beyond human experience. Pure knowledge, truth, certainty and universal law were acquired in the esoteric sacred worlds carved out by religion, philosophy and science.

Enlightenment, salvation and eternal life were attainable to only those brave, disciplined and clever enough to not become attached or deceived by the transitory sensorial world of mundane experience. The world of human experience was deemed an empty illusion bound to be dominated by physical and emotional pain and suffering haunted by the inevitability of death. Continue Reading »

The following is the introduction from my book Exploring Intimacy which can be accessed by clicking on the words tab. The entire book is available for your perusal and I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout most of my life there has been an attitudinal thread running through me. All my thoughts, actions and feelings have come together to form one unified view of life. This unified view forms the basis of my theory of intimacy.

This theory tends to all the major questions of life including, what is love, where do I find meaning, how can I be happy, and how can I derive the most from my moment to moment experiences?

The basic views outlined in this book were initially formed as early as high school but began to take shape and become organized in my early twenties. Since then I have been pleasantly surprised to see how my earliest intuitions have been validated through all I have read and experienced throughout the years.

While other people I knew created their ideal world around religious beliefs, love, faith, or psychological/philosophical schools of thought, I instead found myself drawn to a very practical way of looking at and appreciating my experiences. This attitude soon found a name, that being intimacy. Continue Reading »

The better people can predict and understand their surroundings the more likely their continued survival. This fact underlies our age old desire to answer the question why and propels our interest in science, religion and philosophy or any other inquiry increasing our knowledge of ourselves, others and nature. Our desire to survive and have a good life underpins our inclination to make sense of things and create societies providing justice, freedom and protection.

Humankind has spent a great deal of time and energy searching for ways to mentally and emotionally cope with and understand death, suffering, disease and physical harm. People have theorized many reasons why people die or endure great suffering and misfortune. In myth, religion and mysticism we find many roots of misfortune. Sometimes it was a form of punishment due to the breaking of a law, taboo or divine interdiction. At other times misfortune came to one due to a curse placed on oneself or one’s ancestors, or as a result of magic. At other times it was attributed to a stain or contamination that has occurred, often without one’s direct knowledge. Vestiges of such ancient explanations remain in modern times in theories and beliefs regarding of sin, karma and the existence of evil.

While death is hard to accept under any circumstance it was and is particularly difficult to deal with when it pertains to the young and innocent. Humankind has always struggled to explain and justify the death or disability of a young child or infant. Death may be inevitable, but suffering and misfortune do not happen to everyone, and man has often had a hard time justifying why bad things happen to good people.

The great majority of misfortune and suffering was observed to be beyond the powers of human control and intervention. Therefore, it was common to hand over the reasons and causes of death and calamity to beings with powers which greatly superseded the capabilities of humans.

People all over the globe formed belief systems on how best to protect oneself from the ill will of higher powers. Aligning oneself with, winning the favor of, appeasing, placating, or even sometimes fooling the powers or gods became the general means of insuring oneself a favorable fate and averting suffering and misfortune. Some cultures focused on making sacrifices to the gods, others on learning the ways of power and controlling them through magic and sorcery, others focused on the benefits of revering and begging the mercy of the powerful spirits.

While humankind as a whole was not able to completely overcome the capriciousness of ill fortune, individuals and sometimes entire tribes could engage in activities and rituals which brought them good fortune or averted suffering or “unnecessary” harm. Religion and spirituality are full of legends, stories, allegories and myths which describe events and strategies of heroes, gods and common people who have found the means of averting danger and soliciting good fortune.

The gods of greek and roman mythology shared many of the same traits and emotions as the humans that worshipped them. The apparent capriciousness and irrationality of fate was made understandable when controlled by beings that lusted, had pride, were vain and had a need to be revered and adored. The human quality of the gods, while making them less reliable and consistent, made it possible for the faithful to find ways to win their favor or have them intervene on their behalf. So, the myths of roman and greek gods both explained why fate was often so cruel and filled with suffering, and at the same time offered a means by which people could improve their lot in life through worship, heroes, and rites and rituals.

In monotheistic religions or those that focused on a sole creator the supreme power seldom retained any weaknesses, fallibilities or human personality traits. The creator God was all powerful, perfect and good. Many of the creation gods were also promised eternal life and salvation for all of the faithful that lived a good life. In this way the injustices of fate were often made tolerable by the fact that eternal life awaited those who remained devoted and faithful to God and his wishes. While prayer could occasionally result in divine intervention, even ill fortune and injustice suffered in this life would be rectified in the here after.

While an all good and perfect God may be both worthy of worship and the title of divinity, there are numerous drawbacks for the faithful. If God is perfect and all good, than anything wrong in the world in due to our fallible and sinful nature. A perfect god is incapable of capricious, petty or malicious behavior. Any perception on our part of injustice is either born of our ignorance or as just recompense for some offense we have committed.

If god is perfect, then so is his creation, and since we are the only creature bestowed with a free will, than all sin and fault is ours and ours alone. When God and his creation are perfect and good then the irony of having a free will is that the only way we can express our individuality is through doing something un-godlike and imperfect (sinful). If we put everything that we did, think and feel that differed from a perfect god into a bag, its contents would only consist of error, sin, stupidity, vanity and all other forms of imperfection and non-goodness. So, while we are told that we are made in God’s image, our entire individuality is expressed in the negative, in sin and in evil.

Belief systems involving a perfect God usually include a story of the fall of man in which evil entered the world and the idyllic relationship between God and man was severed. Often this severed relationship is when evil entered the world, and permanently stained all generations of man with this original sin.

I’m not saying that the above is explicitly stated by all religions and belief systems involving a perfect God. Yet, the conclusions reached are the logical ramifications and implications inherent in a perfect God of which I am not the first to recognize or state. In fact, the belief that man’s nature is basically sinful and base has often been expressed by prophets, sages, saints and holy men throughout the world as reason and need for us to obey and praise God as well explaining why we should never question him/her.

When accepting the existence if a perfect god there are only two answers to the question, “why do babies die?” One answer is that it is a mystery that far surpasses our feeble and imperfect understanding. The second answer is that it is our fault that babies die due to our natures and that all suffering and evil entered into the world through our thoughts, actions and feelings.

Our belief in a perfect god comes with a price to our own sense of worth and value. A child who is told by their parent that they are sinful and evil and that they have nothing to offer but obedience seldom ends up being a healthy, loving and productive adult. So how does our sinful view of ourselves induced by our revering a perfect god impact the way we live and feel about ourselves and our ability to solve social problems and live in harmony with others?

If we have a free will it should be viewed and exercised in a way in which we can be happy with ourselves and harmonious with our contemporaries and with nature. Our choice shouldn’t be between arrogant pride and self-degradation, or between conceit and subservience. Admitting that we are limited and fallible does not mean that we are incompetent or toxic, but only that we are vulnerable and are capable of making things worse as well as making things better.

When putting together a list of the greatest inventions of humankind, the wheel is always near the top. The wheel is considered to be one the most versatile and important tools used in a host of settings. Along with the lever, the wheel is best known for its ability to assist us in getting work done. A fraction of the amount of work and effort is involved by wheeling things around as opposed to lifting and carrying. Almost every form of human transport whether it be used for work, commerce or battle involves machines utilizing the wheel. The wheel has deserved the title of being the most essential and basic tool in human labor and in our ability to do work, efficiently, safely and quickly.

While the wheel is the quintessential symbol of work, the ball is the most familiar and ubiquitous tool of play. We humans never tire of kicking, throwing, batting, dribbling, striking, hitting, paddling, spinning and rolling balls. Many games and sports involve contacting the ball directly while others hit the ball with an utensil specifically designed for the game or activity. While balls and spheres can be used for work as well as play, they are generally associated with play.

One could make a case for the ball being just as useful as the wheel, and just as prevalent in the lives of every person. Yet, the fact that the ball is equated with play as in “having a ball” or “take me out to the ball game”, and the wheel with work as in “have your shoulder to the wheel” makes the wheel seem more important. Our society has a tendency to glorify and value work while belittling play as being trite and superficial.

Yet, when one looks at the fight for survival in the animal kingdom play is just as important as work. Each predator and prey spends the bulk of their childhood learning their basic survival skill set through play. Human children too spend the bulk of their developmental years learning the basic skills of being human through play. Play dominates learning, growing and development in humans and animals. Play also is at the center of bonding and relationship building in all societies be they human or animal.

The typical ball is a sphere, a complete three-dimensional globe measuring 360 degrees. If you were to strip away a good portion of a ball leaving a narrow tread you would be left with a ball. In essence a wheel is just a mutilated ball with a relatively narrow tread. While a ball is able to go in any direction with complete ease, the wheel can only go backward and forward and needs specific steering mechanism to alter its course.

A wheel is linear and predictable and, therefore, ideal for work and repetitive tasks. A ball is omnidirectional and spontaneous and perfect for play and inventiveness. Our culture’s bias favoring work while viewing play as trivial or something one outgrows is what prevents the ball from being viewed as an important invention or human accomplishment. I for one think that work is overrated and that play is truly an essential ingredient in the quality of life and human fulfillment.

The experience of pleasure has played a key role in human history and development. Pleasure is crucial to our desire for sex, food, friendships, community, and appreciation of nature and our environment. Pleasure is the template for happiness, joy and meaning.

In general pleasure has guided us towards things that insure our survival such as sex and food, and fosters our desire for friendship, community and appreciation of nature and our environment. Displeasure and pain on the other hand guide us away from things which endanger, injure, poison, disable us or restrict our quality of life.

Pleasure is at the core of our ability to both survive and to thrive. Throughout human history pleasure has led us towards life affirming behavior, while pain has averted us from life threatening and destructive events.

Non-sentient and even molecular life seems to have mechanisms that promote pleasure and survival and avert pain and extinction. The vestiges or precursors to pleasure are visible in the reflex reaction of a cell’s shrinking back from a dangerous or foreign substance and gravitating or incorporating a life affirming stimuli or substance.

While the pleasure/pain economy has been very efficient, it is by no means an infallible or perfect mechanism. Adaptations to dramatic or novel changes in the environment can trick the pleasure mechanism or cause it to fail in its ability to avoid or adapt to life threatening situations and events.

Our pleasure and pain economy does have a learning curve and since it is structured in our nervous system and body often takes generations to successfully adapt and incorporate new tastes in pleasure and pain. Just as our immune system takes time to adapt to a new germ, virus or bacteria to which we are being exposed.

We have pain and pleasure thresholds, in which both have acceptable ranges. We have all had the experience of a pleasurable experience being taken to excess in which the pleasurable experience crosses the threshold and becomes unpleasant if not painful.

Pain too often has a threshold that once passed we either lose consciousness or our body discharges powerful anesthetics into our system. Yet, our threshold of pain often provides us a warning system that offers us opportunities to improve our health or widen our capacities. The pain involved in exercise and physical exertion are often guide posts we can use that if we stay inside the thresholds we improve our abilities, immune system, or over all health.

Our conscious selves can change at a far greater speed than our organic selves, and to a large extent our pleasure/pain continuum is dominated by our organic selves. This ability for consciousness to grow and change at speeds that greatly surpass the organic self can lead to our conscious self duping or causing our pleasure economy to fail or give false signals.

Many substances and experiences which stimulate the pleasure response have a long history of being life enhancing or replicate the chemicals the body produces to have us feel pleasure, joy, connection, etc. Yet, our conscious abilities allow us to alter, distill, manipulate, modify, combine and increase the frequency and dosage of these substances and events which can result in our developing unhealthy and even life threatening compulsions and addictions. This fact has led us to over react, to mistrust or sometimes vilify our bodies pleasure signals.

This tendency of conscious mind to subvert and pervert our pleasure/pain economy has resulted in our devaluing or fearing pleasure and our organic self. The long history of human existence has been filled with much pain and suffering which has also induced self-conscious beings into sometimes choosing anesthesia over pleasure. This desire to over come suffering by becoming physically numb and emotionally detached is at the core of every major religion and spiritual practice.

Sense and Self-Consciousness

Through the instinctual, reflexive and ever evolving pleasure/pain mechanism (dynamic) our sensorial organic self (body) was able to be guided to make increasingly successful life affirming decisions. Over the course of time these decisions not only insured the survival of our species though successful adaptation, but created increasingly complex and rich experience.

Our sensorial world of pleasure and pain induced ever increasing awareness of our inner and outer world. Senses such as taste and touch had pronounced internal components. Our skin through the sense of touch was a major way in which we took in and interfaced with the world. Yet, an internal sense of touch put us in contact with our visceral selves. This is the sense of satiation and completion from food and water, or the warning pain of a head or stomach ache.

The sensation of taste occurs in our mouth and is felt inside our body. While we occasionally experience a taste in our mouth, the sense of taste is generally activated by the taking in of life from the outside world.

Smell is very associated and a companion of our sense of taste. While we experience smell inside our body we are very aware of its external origins and in fact we feel that we are smelling the rose as it exists outside of our nose and nostrils. Similar to smell we hear noises from the outside even though we experience them internally through the ear. Yet, we often can hear noises from inside the body such as our breathing, heartbeat, growling stomach or even creaking bones. In this manner of internal awareness hearing bears a strong resemblance to our sense of touch.

Our sense of sight is the most abstract and spatial of our senses. While many of our other senses directly affect and alter our real inner world, our sense of vision gives depth to all the other senses by having them orient all experience in the highly articulated world of the outside environment.

With our keen sense of vision we can plan, take evasive action, manipulate, prepare and imagine in ways which no other sense can come close to replicating. The closest rival does seem to hearing and is often the most developed sense of any one deprived of good vision.

Our sense of smell became less valuable to us as we became bipeds which stood erect and vertically open to the world rather than on all fours and being focused on the ground beneath us. So while the growing richness of our senses increased our awareness of our environment, changes in biological design such as our becoming two footed runners and observers of our horizons probably had a greater impact on the development and predominance of our self-consciousness (mind).

There appear to many factors that led to our amazing level of self-consciousness and intellectual acuity. A few of the factors would include the already mentioned standing erect, along with opposable thumbs and the evolution of the brain especially the neocortex. Our ability to articulate and unfold self-consciousness is difficult to imagine occurring without the accelerated growth in all forms of symbolic language especially that of words.

Moderns have difficulty imagining quality experience devoid of thought, or quality thought devoid of language (words). Yet, it reasonable to assume that man started off with a very small vocabulary similar to how children learn spoken language today. One would think that a very restricted vocabulary would have a difficult time producing a large volume of thoughts and that their occurrence was not the continual stream that we moderns have become accustomed to experiencing. I personally have a recollection of early childhood where events, play and fantasy dominated and did not seem to be so thought and word dependent. Also, our translations of the writing of ancient greeks (and others) are filled with examples of citizens who expressed surprise and discomfort for even the most mundane of thoughts and emotions usually denying any ownership of them and viewing them as coming from outside or a gift from the gods.

As sensorial awareness become richer and self-consciousness expanded due to factors such as brain and language development the emotional and psychological life of men was born and became increasingly dominant. The emergence of self-consciousness made us aware of the passage of time and of our having a personal history. We increasingly went from a body responding and reacting to external and internal stimuli to a consciousness planning, anticipating, hoping, regretting, feeling, desiring and searching for meaning in what we did and thought.

Conceptual and Physical Pleasure

The sensorial body is generally locked in the here and now. The pleasure pain mechanisms helped guide this body towards life affirming behavior and experiences and away from harmful or life threatening ones. The birth and development of self-consciousness aided the body in its goal of survival by giving it more options to alter and modify its environment, while expanding its abilities and resources to defend itself and acquire life’s necessities.

Self-consciousness and its rich emotional and psychological life developed its own pleasure and pain system which guided its desire to survive and flourish. Pleasurable emotional and psychological states such as loyalty, attachment, love and self-care were balanced by painful one’s such as mourning, anxiety, and anger which often aided in personal survival.

The mind and thoughts kinship with the sense of sight aided in its ability to imagine (images) and envision the possible and thereby assist in its altering or influencing the immediate environment. The ability to harbor and access the past, see the present from a global perspective, and anticipate the future gave self-conscious a tremendous advantage in the ability to survive and successfully adapt to one’s surroundings.

Self-consciousness was able to not only assist the sensorial body, but also to invent, create and imagine pleasures beyond the scope and design of the sensorial body. When pain and suffering became too great the mind was learning how to cope with, escape or even transmute suffering through imagination and belief.

The desire to escape pain and suffering through the creative powers of the mind became a vital component of the belief systems, myths and religions of almost every culture on the face of the earth. This overcoming of pain and suffering could be accomplished through salvation, revelation, enlightenment, a promise of of life after death, or esthetic practices of emotional detachment.

The overcoming of pain and suffering by transcending the body and its vulnerable sensorial world has been on the ascent for many centuries. The body and its world of successful functioning through pleasure and pain has been supplanted by an abstract world of belief and mind over matter.

Yet, abstract pleasure is not as rich as sensorial pleasure and self-consciousness combined. An imagined juicy peach is not as satisfying and pleasurable as eating a real peach. While imagined pleasure can be beneficial it truly cannot replace our very real needs for food, water and air.

The abstract pleasures of mind divorced from the sensorial body are quite beneficial and often necessary means of our being able to cope and deal with great pain and suffering. Yet, one is currently not in a state of suffering the taking flight into mind weakens our experiences and deprives us of all the millennia of benefits of what our sensorial body has learned of how to survive and flourish. No matter how self-conscious we become our sensorial bodies are what have us successfully live and function in the real world at a reaction speed far faster than we can think and make self-conscious decisions.

Spirituality and The Flesh

The belief that the body is a burden or a necessary hurdle on one’s journey towards heaven, nirvana, or some other form of eternal union is at the heart of many religions and spiritual practices. The belief that some essence called spirit will survive the death of the body, and in the case of reincarnation return again and again in new bodies until perfection is reached, and in the end will end up in a state of union for all eternity is extremely common.

The blissful state of this ultimate union is too refined for the gross sensorial body chained to the world of attached pleasure and pain. This spiritual state beyond pleasure and pain demonstrates the desire if not glorification of anesthesia.

The fear of pain and suffering is greater than the rich joys that are only able to be attained through the sensorial body. The unity and connection often espoused at the heart of spiritual practices is by definition bodiless. It is a unity of spirit or consciousness and not a physical connection or a rich sensorial pleasure such as the peach, but rather only the thought of the peach, or love, or actual connection.

Our sensorial body is very aware of physical connection and our consciousness can find no other analog to use. We should not find this surprising since the process of mind is born from the interaction of environment, body, nervous system and brain. All of our imagining are structured in the real world of the sensorial body, and all our conceptual pleasures of spirituality are structured in that very same rich and abundant sensorial world.

Spiritualists often make the universe as the ultimate source of our connection. The grand universe shows how we are all one. Our concept of universe is very similar to the monotheistic vision of a one god or creator that unifies and is everything. In either case most modern spiritualism emphasizes connection through the unity of the one “uni-verse” (uni meaning one).

I personally find the universe too abstract to be my source of connection. The universe is far too large for me to “feel”. The universe and God for that matter are beyond the constructs of our mind and its capacities for comprehension. The unfathomable dimensions of the universe do not inspire intimate connection, and the fact that the vast overwhelming majority of space is dead and devoid of any life (even molecular) is not warm and fuzzy but actually frightening.

Why would anyone make something so cold, distant, empty and unfathomable the very template and rationale for connection and unity? Why do people so readily seek connection out there, rather than right here? In many ways it replicates our connecting to others via cell phones and internet while ignoring family and friends at the restaurant we are at.

The universe for me is not a great image for unity and connection, but rather an inexhaustible source of awe and wonder. My source of connection is not found way out there, but rather right here. As I noted earlier, our sensorial bodies are intimately aware of the interconnection and interdependency of life.

I take in a bit of the world in every inhalation and return a bit of me in every exhalation. My connection and dependence on the world is obvious in every breath I take. My entire sensorial world full of pleasure and physical challenges is a dance of perpetual interdependence. My body is a host of interacting systems and generally harmonious colonies of microbes without which my life would not
continue.

I am fashioned by every interaction I have with another person, and every conversation I partake in. In many ways it is the divorcing and separation of self-consciousness itself which is at the source of our feeling of being disconnected. A sensorial body aided by self-conscious ego is capable of creating a tangible intimate existence. Not just an abstract union but a very real corporeal and rich intimacy.

Spirituality and religion are steeped in abstract language where the goal is radical change showing deep dissatisfaction with mundane life. Spiritual and religious texts goals often involve transformation, salvation and enlightenment, where the goal is the transcendence of mundane life, the sensorial body and the extinction of the individual ego.

I personally want to find better ways to appreciate, savor and intimately engage in life. I do not desire making everything one, but relish in the plenitude and diversity of our lush planet teeming with life. I see little benefit and great loss by trying to reduce life to a singularity. I seek no ultimates, certainties or eternal truths but rather look to embrace and enjoy the endless process of becoming more familiar, comfortable and intimate with my environment and the people who share it with me.

The following is the lyrics and reverie for Deus Ex Machina a song of mine which will be released as a track on the album I’m Just Saying later this week.

Deus Ex Machina

Deus ex Machina is literally “the god machine”. In ancient Greek tragedies it was a device used at the end of the play to save the day through divine intervention to extricate the lead characters from sure and utter ruin.

In this song a strong proud woman is counseled to remain patient despite the fact that the speed of life is seemingly careening out of control. The counsel of her contemporaries seem to suggest that she should take solace in her beliefs and that soon her prayers will be answered by a last minute appearance of the god machine. We moderns are likewise being asked to trust that through our faith in religion, spirituality, technology or science will be plucked out of the immanent disaster our current path seems to be on.

In the late 60’s Buckminster Fuller published a book entitled Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. The book focused on how the earth is essentially a huge spaceship with a limited amount of resources which cannot be resupplied. All of the life on this self-contained ship traveling through space is fragile and mutually dependent on each other for its continued survival.

Our blatant over use of finite resources such as oil, and our continual polluting of our air and water since his book was released bear comparison to the way the characters in the old greek plays ignored the prophesies of the savants in the tragedies. Our foolhardiness becomes even more obvious when we take the analogy between the earth and a giant space ship a little further.

Imagine the fate of the Star Ship Enterprise or some other city sized spaceship, if they allowed their water and air supply to be polluted and toxic. In addition, imagine the repercussions if they routinely had battles between different sectors of the ship in which passengers were killed and their living environment (hardware) were destroyed. How long would the voyage last?

The interdependence of organic and sentient life is a functional and practical reality, while our concepts of nation, political ideology, belief and judgment are relatively arbitrary. Without trees we could not breathe, nor could our bodies function and survive without germs and bacteria. The kill of be killed philosophy which dominates our modern world view is misguided and untenable. Strategies of how to coexist should not be relegated to the realm of utopia or idealism, for they are essential to our continual survival.

Words of hope, promise, and national or ethnic superiority pale in comparison to the importance of actions which increase the quality of life for all the inhabitants of space ship earth. The earth is a lush and vibrant planet due more to the ability of organic life to cooperate, adapt, harmonize and thrive than for its ability for individual organisms to defeat and destroy other organisms. While each individual organism must eat or perish, they also depend on the overall health and expansion of all life on the planet for their continued existence.

People turn a blind eye to the atrocities done in their name, or even defend, justify and support the actions of governments which are destroying people and nature. We are endangered by nuclear warheads and accidents, the degradation and increased toxicity of our water and air, the destruction of arable land and the overuse of non replenish-able resources. The earths growing population and advances in technology have created the opportunity for us to have killed and caused more human suffering than any previous empire on earth. We have killed millions upon millions of innocents under the ironic and absurd pretext of giving people their freedom.

So should we be like the ancient Greeks and still pin our hopes on divine intervention or the eleventh hour appearance of a god machine?

The earth has successfully dealt with every crisis it has faced. Despite the fact that life has always been fragile and survival has always been a reality, life on our planet has not only persisted but flourished. The earth is the only blue/green planet that our science has been able to find, so our planet had to do something right in order to create and support organic life. All we have to do is tap into and continue the tradition of our flourishing planet.

Deus Ex Machina

Deluge of broken comedies, the joker licks the steam
Laura struggles to make it better puts her pride in relief
The treadmill keeps moving faster all is on the increase
Before you slip into the chasm enter the god machine

Keep your toes on the line don’t trip on that line, trip on that line
Your hopes are in the future, so they tell you, so they tell you
So they tell you, so they sell you all will be improve a little later
Running cold, running bold, running blind, can you set the pace?

Lunge onward in darkness blindfolded by the mask of innocence
Walk softly pretty lady have faith in the guiding hand
Take a sleep on stony ground, not much you can do with this land
Listen safe to the deep voice that tells you what lies below

It’s cold, so cold and shady but a few yards yonder lies a brook
You can rest there for awhile, rest there lover
All looks so bleak, the edge of defeat, have faith in some alien god machine
Kiss the treasure the golden dream for here comes the god machine

Adorable god of fortune is late upon the scene
Make me shiver in wonder of your awesome majesty
Pluck us from the danger, the climactic deed
If you’re made of plaster what awaits sweet destiny?

Golden idol of reason celestial or divine
Save us at eleven before our last midnight
All looks so bleak, the edge of defeat, have faith in some alien god machine
Kiss the treasure the golden dream for here comes the god machine
Deus ex machina
Enter the god machine
Deus ex machina